A novel scheme for 4-D Light-Field compression based on 3-D representation by multi-focus images

Light-Field enables us to observe scenes from free viewpoints. However, it generally consists of 4-D enormous data, that are not suitable for storing or transmitting without effective compression. 4-D Light-Field is very redundant because essentially it includes just 3-D scene information. Actually, although robust 3-D scene estimation such as depth recovery from Light-Field is not so easy, we successfully derived a method of reconstructing Light-Field directly from 3-D information composed of multi-focus images without any scene estimation. On the other hand, it is easy to synthesize multi-focus images from Light-Field. In this paper, based on the method, we propose novel Light-Field compression via synthesized multi-focus images as effective representation of 3-D scenes. Multi-focus images are easily compressed because they contain mostly low frequency components. We show experimental results by using synthetic and real images. Reconstruction quality of the method is robust even at very low bit-rate.